I am one of the 21,625 backers in the System Shock Kickstarter. I am not one of the (insert number) backers in the (insert project name) Kickstarter in the, foreseeable or not, future.
I’m not going to attempt and justify my backing. First, the money were disposable. Second, I’m not going to say it seemed totally legit. It, in fact, did. So did Operation Cannot Possibly Fail. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t matter.
Opening Stephen Kick’s (seriosuly, no-one, not one reporter could point a finger at his name… what a sad, sad world) latest email while taking a morning dump didn’t move me one way or another, intestinally or otherwise. Things were already putrid and brown, and I’m not referring to anything in my bathroom.
The more that we worked on the game, the more that we wanted to do, and the further we got from the original concepts that made System Shock so great.
I kind of imagine what everyone’s immediately thinking. ‘Feature creep’. It’s a phrase Kickstarter practically invented, and it’s just an empty excuse for blatant incompetence. Nightdive Studios had it all laid out. Irresponsible, unqualified decisions are now witness to it pushing up daisies.
The big question of course is, can they scrap the years of I’ve-no-idea-what-I’m-doing and fall back to times when there was a plan. Well, if one reads between the lines of Kick’s vague apologetic bullshit, the funding’s gone, vapourised, squandered in useless fucking around with experiments only a miserably few super-rich studios can afford. What are the options? Seek a publishing deal? Ask people for more money?
Whichever way one looks at it, one thing’s irrefutable. The System Shock Kickstarter is dead. What it managed to fund is a headless chicken and whatever the final product will be (if there ever will be one) won’t see the light of day as an outcome of it. Freddie, bring it!
Yeah. We like death metaphors, we like them a lot.
Via: Kickstarter
